Posted
by
timothy
on Monday February 24, 2003 @09:49AM
from the when-when-when dept.

Emmettfish writes "According to this release on Xiph.org, it looks like the Neuros player will support Linux users, and also give them the ability to play back Vorbis files on the move, starting in late May. Go Ogg! Remember, donating a few bucks to Xiph may not make the world a better place, but it'll definitely help it
sound a lot better." For those of us craving a portable that plays from cheap CD-Rs rather than flash media or a hard drive, Emmett says by email that an agreement for development of firmware for a CD-based Ogg player is in the works, too.

I'm glad this is finally happening... too bad it doesn't say how much this thing costs. Speaking as a broke college student, I can't afford to pay a ridiculous premium for a small gain in audio quality.

No kidding. This is great and all - but good lord. All the MP3 players are big $$$$ IMHO.

They have about $12 worth of parts in them if that much and they are all over $150.00... I want one to work out with at the gym - but I'm not paying that much for one when I can have a CD walkman for $20 bucks....

I got the 128MB Nomad MuVo(stupid name, I know) for 131 from newegg, including shipping. Still a bit pricey, I know, but considering the advantages over a CD player (no skipping, much smaller, 12 hour battery life) I think it's worth it.

YAMPP MP3 players [myplace.nu] can be made for the parts for about 80 dollars... perhaps less if you can find things on clearance. It is nowhere near $12, however.

Likewise, many MP3 players are significantly lower than 150 dollars. Poking around on Shopping.yahoo.com, you can find the the Ampigo3 for 50, the Samsung YEPP for 50, the JamP3 for 40, the Audiovox MP-1000 for 40, and the D-Link DMP-100 for 35 dollars. Rio PMP 300's are still available on ebay for $50 or less. They're all about the same quality as the "latest" MP3 players from sonicblue, and will compare favorably to that $20 CD walkman for high-impact activities like treadmill jogging, cycling, etc.

If you look hard, you can find 20GB Archos Jukeboxes for $150.

If you want an MP3 player, now is a great time. Actually, last year was a great time. Now isn't that bad though. Do some legwork and start saving those batteries.

Check here [nimhbattery.com] for a good supplier for NiMH batteries and chargers. I don't work for them and I actually purchased my Ray-o-vac 1 hour charger and batteries from Walmart, but nimhbattery has a much better selection of batteries and chargers.

Some things I have learned about NiMH stuff:- Buy a good charger. Cheap chargers ( probably first gen) generally work by timer not actual battery condition. The Radio Shack fast charger almost cooked a new set of batteries for me.

- Get second generation batteries, they are properly vented for the fast chargers and have higher current capacity ( 1800-2000mAh for AA size).

- Get a charger that matches your needs, even if you have to pay more. My current charger allows home or mobile charging (12v cig lighter plug) which is great for digital camera use. I bought three other cheaper chargers and regret the purchases, features and quality will actually be important.

- Don't let other people borrow your charger or batteries, you may never see them again. If you do let someone borrow your batteries, then make sure you explain that they should not discard them after they are discharged. Don't ask!

You can put together a cheaper system. You could save $25 dollars by going with an 1100Mhz Duron processor and save $20 more by shaving the RAM down to $128. That would bring you down to $400. It just seems like that extra $45 buys a hell of a lot extra power. (check out Toms CPS Performance Check [tomshardware.com])

I've been waiting years for a cd player that canplay mp3's , because all the ones I've seen aresmall home company's which never ever get outsideof the country they were created in. I like theidea's behind ogg , but haven't switched to it yet

If a big name company releases a ogg cd player(rw) mind you and it reaches the backwaters whereI live , I'll jump on the bandwagon 100% and googg

It should be pointed out that the notion that Ogg Vorbis is provides better quality audio is not universally accepted. Audio quality is incredibly difficult to quantify as it is subjective. Even if you ignore all the different variables (CBR vs VBR, quality of audio equipment, etc.) one person may make very different judgements from another (especially with Vorbis and Mp3 being so close).

And most tech reviews I have read seem to indicate that the different compression formats (Vorbis, Mp3 and WMA) all have different strengths when it comes to particular types of music.

Thus Ogg doesn't have a "better audio", CD-quality Ogg just takes less space than CD-quality MP3. However with 20GB capacity in players, bitrate is quite irrelevant.

There is no such thing as 'CD-quality' when dealing with a lossy encoder like mp3 or Ogg Vorbis. True CD quality can only be attained with a lossless encoder, like FLAC [sf.net] or Shorten.

If you think Ogg Vorbis sounds better than mp3 at comparable bitrate or lower, then it's safe to say that you consider Ogg Vorbis representative of "better audio," or better reproduction of sound. If you do find this to be true, then you're in good company; Large amounts of double-blind testing agrees with you.

Bitrate is never irrelevant. Bitrate multiplied by time equals size, and anyone who has ever filled a hard drive could probably tell you about how some things can look very large indeed from far away, but hit their limit of usefulness in a curiously small amount of time.

As a long time follower of the different audio encoding technologies, I have to agree with you on your point that the quality of the different formats seems to be quite subjective, but personally, I'm one of the many (few?) whose ears are overwhelmingly in favor of Ogg.

I can't STAND WMA at all... it has a high end ringing screech at pretty much any bitrate, while at the same time, some people swear by WMA. WMA also boosts the volume of the encoded material to give the listener the impression that it's better quality, which is bad form, IMO.

MP3 is pretty impressive nowadays, with all of the work that has gone into LAME... Even 128kbit VBR is passable. But as I said, to my ears at least, they all bow before Ogg. That same passable quality you get at 128kbit with LAME you get at 96kbit with Ogg. And the artifacts are also much less offensive to my ears, but again, that is a matter of opinion.

Anyway, I hear too much completely uninformed Ogg bashing, and I wish everyone would do some objective testing of their own. Go read up on blind ABX testing [pcabx.com], and do some yourself. If Ogg isn't the one you think sounds best, that's fine, but just don't say it's crap without giving it a shot!

especially with Vorbis and Mp3 being so close
Vorbis and MP3 are not close. Even at high bitrates MP3 sucks, at 256Kb/s with the latest build of LAME I hear irritating artefacts (yes, I've done a blind comparison with the original CD, ripped to wav. I could hear the difference every time.). Vorbis and AAC (with the psytel encoder - the Dolby consumer one just isn't up to scratch) are close. For some things AAC is better, for some Vorbis is. I've just switched from AAC to Vorbis because the standard is open, and so I know I'm not going to be hounded for patent royalties at a later date. I often listen to a 42kbps ogg stream. Sure, I can hear artefacts in it, but it's fine for background music while I work. I couldn't say the same about MP3 at anything lower than 128Kbps, and even then I'd be dubious.

There are some experiments being done and some listening data available, mostly on hydrogenaudio.org site. Seems like the general consensus at this point is that OGG is somewhat better than MP3 at the average rate about 128Kbps, but at the rates 200Kbps+ MP3 is better (meaning 'less artifacts'). At the rates lower than 128Kbps (where MP3 simply doesn't cut), OGG does a good job and apparently is better than WMA. So seems like OGG at this time competes with alternative lossy compressors at the rates 128Kbps and lower. If you tend to record at 200Kbps average, like the latest LAME default settings, you may as well stick with MP3 unless of course you are against MP3 'in principle'.

According to your nick, you are a cat, but I suspect you are in fact part of some FUD spreading team, or at least woefully mislead.
" I buy a few patented items every time I go to the grocery store. It doesn't bother me if there is a patent on that stand-up toothpaste dispenser and I don't see why it should, as long as it doesn't prevent me from getting the product and it only makes up a small fraction of its price. Why should it be different when paying $2 extra for that portable player or iTunes?"

If the patent owners on the toothpaste dispenser started charging at $50 royalty, obviously you would switch brands. If Thomson Conumer Electronics or MSFT started demanding outrageous royalties for MP3/WMA, you would switch to OGG, yes? Wait, your entire music collection is encoded in WMA... you're out of luck until you re-encode. Maybe at the time this happens, you are running MSFT's super DRM operating system with palladium and you can't even transcode your WMA/MP3 to ogg because you don't want to pay to access them. We shouldn't just pay a small fee and settle for MP3/WMA because unlike the toothpaste, you entire history of useage of the product is what they use to force you to stay with it. Re-encoding an entire music selection is not easy work.

" There is a loose end of non-commercial encoders, decoders and streams. But so far, mp3 consortium is just letting them exist and going after commercial licenses (that's as far as I know, any corrections?). Another good solution would be for them to ask end users go to some website and pay $5 for the right to use any MP3 software of their choice."

Thompson shut down BladeENC which was an open source encoder with patent litigaton. Fraunhofer's original purpose for creating MP3 was clearly stated: They want to make money from patent royalties on streaming audio. That's why the original FHG encoder was so bad above 128 kbit/s. It was designed for low bitrate streaming -- most people did not have broadband back then and Napster did not exist. In the long run, they will not tolerate companies or individuals who make free products to compete with paid ones. They, like any commercial entity, are out to make money!

" Yes, mp3 consortium could start going after LAME and WinAmp, harassing P2P users and otherwise turn evil. And that's a good thing that OGG and WMA are around to keep them reasonable. But they didn't turn evil yet and in the worst case I'll lose a couple of hundred bucks then buying new devices."

Of course OGG is around to keep Thompson reasonable. Although Thompson has said that they think there's patent infringing code within OGG Vorbis. (You'd think they would know considering that it's open source.) As to losing a couple of hundred dollars on new devices, you're saying that you would PAY to get into a world where you use products where a company can just instantly decide that you have to pay additional fees to access your music collection, and you're happy with that?

" As for quality, interoperability is far more important. If you make an 128Khz, CBR MP3, you can give it to about anyone and be sure they'll be able to play it. With OGG or WMA, a Mac user will be at least forced to do some painful things to hear the sound. And with portable players all bets are off. Even Linux-based Zaurus doesn't come with OGG support by default."

This is what the people who stand to make a lot of money from you on patented audio formats WANT you to say and think. Apathy in changing formats will just let them snare you that much more easily. It is just like with banks -- I work in the banking industry and I know that it is only apathy that keeps most people banking with their bank. If they woke up and looked at their situation, they would probably be able to find a better deal where they get the same services at much less cost with higher interest rates for their savings.

" Besides, mp3pro is not bad if you want quality at low bandwidth and still works with regular MP3 players in a pinch. Why not give it a try if you are not worried about interoperability?"

Once you start going with mp3pro, you run into the same problems with mp3. The cycle of exploitation by patents starts again.

If you were trying to write FUD, I hope you now realise that you need more practice because you are a poor FUD-spreader. If you honestly believed what you said, I hope you have learned something by reading this.

Fairly expensive. But I do like the built-in FM transmitter. Also, I would recommend buying the 128MB unit, as the 20GB HDD will be available as a "backpack" that makes the 128 exactly the same (size, shape, capacity) as the 20GB unit. However, the 20GB unit can't be "downgraded" to a smaller, more pocketable 128.

It has a *very* limited range. Like you, and maybe the car next to you, if you both have your windows open and the other driver has a good antenna. Hell of a lot cleaner than a tape adapter, and easier than pulling your stereo out to add an RF modulator so that you can plug the thing directly in.

Your point is sound, but that's the way our society/industry works. People who make the money aren't the ones who pioneer new technologies - it's the people who innovate the new inventions, and make them better (e.g. putting new ogg (de|en)coding format in an existing player).

Good! I don't really care about any individual manufacturer, what I want is a portable Ogg player. If someone else brings out a cheaper or better one, that's fine by me. These guys will get a good few sales by ebing first to market, but after that it's ogg eat ogg (sorry).

make sure the players support upgradeable firmware for future codec upgrades and I'm set - tho the specification does claim that all future Ogg Vorbis files will be decodable by the current decoder, it may miss out on improvements and enhancements.

The CD-based player is a good idea for those of us with massive disc collections but just cannot be bothered to transfer the songs - much easier with a change of disc.

Speaking of which - one of Ogg Vorbis' strongest selling points is bitrate peeling - you can "peel" a 192 kbps file to 128 kbps and the resulting file will sound just as good as if it were encoded directly off the original CD/wave file.

>Speaking of which - one of Ogg Vorbis' strongest>selling points is bitrate peeling - you>can "peel" a 192 kbps file to 128 kbps and the>resulting file will sound just as good as if it>were encoded directly off the original CD/wave>file.

Almost. Peeling will not give *exactly* the same quality, but much better than decode/reencode, and it will be faster too.

>But there is no tool yet. When can we expect to>see one?

There is a proof-of-concept tool available right now, but it does not get good quality yet. There hasn't been much demand for it yet so developers have focussed elsewhere - maybe with the portables out this will change.

You're not the only one. My WinCE-based (please stop throwing things at me) Cassiopeia E-100 can run PocketMVP [adelphia.net] which can play MP3/Ogg audio, and MPEG/DivX videos.

The only problem is (as I see it) that a 32MB CF card (which should hold a full CD at almost CD quality "-q0") currently costs $15. On the other hand, Minidiscs are about $1 per disc, hold more than a CD, can record live audio (analog or digital--no computer required) in realtime, can edit the tracks on the fly, has better sound quality than Ogg at even the highest quality settings, has a longer battery life, puts off less heat, never skips, can be rewritten more times than a CF card, are more physically durable than a CF card, etc.

You know, I've often wondered why they haven't developed the ability to digitally transfer files from computer to minidisc, and minidisc to computer

So did "they" (Sony).

If they could do that, I would buy a minidisc player in a second.

Considering that the NetMD recorders have had that ability for years, I think you missed it by more than a second.

A little extra info: "NetMD" recorders hook up to your computer via a USB connection. The software running on your computer converts your MP3s, OGGs, WMAs, WAVs (or whatever other format) to ATRAC3 (which is the MiniDisc's incridibly high quality format), and copies that to the minidisc at high speed. The speed depends on the quality.

MyFi allows you to broadcast the music on your Neuros through any FM radio. Like the one in your car. Or your kitchen. Or your coworker's boombox. MyFi automatically scans the FM radio dial for an available frequency and broadcasts using all digital stereo encoding, just like broadcast towers used by professional radio stations.

I don't think RIAA will like this, but this feature is really a killer-app amha.

I'd like the ability for it to play different songs on different FM frequencies, so maybe I could be in the office and say someone else could be too, and we could all be listening to different music all streamed from the one device. THAT would be killer!?!

This kind of technology has been out for a long, long time. There are all kinds of devices that broadcast to a frequency on your radio... why would the RIAA care? The only people that are going to pick it up are the people 2 feet away from your current position.

What this means for me is that I can play my oggs in my friend's car without the aid of any doohickey cable or any other crap like that. All he needs is an FM receiver. A truly useful [and I do not use the word lightly here] innovation. Wonder why no one ever thought of it before...

I really wouldn't worry about the RIAA here - more likely is the FCC who dictates frequency spectrum allocation, but the transmitting range should be short enough to satisfy their requirements.

The FCC allows unlicensed low-power FM broadcasts without a license. This is how drive-in movie theaters usually work--you listen using your car's sound system. I'm sure someone here can post the exact limits the FCC imposes on such broadcasts, but they're certainly much more generous than this device would require.

Up until a few years ago, the only way to listen to Los Angeles Valley College's radio station was to be on campus with a portable radio. It too used a drive-in type transmitter Actually in the case of KVCM it was an AM transmitter. [eew!] When I was on staff, I was hearing "United Artists Cable (East SFV cable franchise) is going to carry us Real Soon Now" but that didn't happen until about 10 years after I left. There was also talk of a "community radio license" (low-power FM stations that have their transmissions restricted to a very small radius) but of course that option never really got a chance. The FCC first proposed that, then withdrew it under pressure from Big Radio.

Um, they have. Drop by your local Radio Shack. For fifteen bucks you can buy a little device that plugs into the headphones jack on any portable device and broadcasts it on a channel of your choice (well, usually there's a choice of maybe four channels to try). This is how we listen to cassette tapes in my girlfriend's car, which only has a CD player. That said, it is pretty cool that it's built right into the device.

..Huh? You can do it with a wireless FM modulator you can buy at Radioshack for $10 anyway (and people with a discman or mp3 player in their car do it quite a bit already). It IS awesome that it's built in, though.

Recently, I've experimented with Ogg vs. MP3 for streaming voice (lectures, not music), and I find that at the low end of the bandwidth spectrum, Ogg is much better than MP3.

An MP3 file at 32 kbit/second sounds muffled - high frequencies largely removed - while an Ogg at 23 kbit/second (16 kbit nominal) has a much better tonal balance. The Ogg stream is not pristine quality, but much better than the MP3.

If you're interested in packing many hours of low bitrate material, Ogg is the way to go.

If you're using Ogg Vorbis for recording lectures, I suggest you switch to Speex [speex.org]. From the website:

The Speex project aims to build a patent-free, Open Source/Free Software voice codec. Unlike other codecs like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, Speex is designed to compress voice at bitrates in the 2-45kbps range. Possible applications include VoIP, internet audio streaming, archiving of speech data (e.g. voice mail), and audio books. In some sense, it is meant to be complementary to the Ogg Vorbis codec.

Actually, if you're interested in compressing voice, try Speex [speex.org], another Xiph.org codec. At 16 kHz sampling rate, you can get almost transparent quality around 20-24 kbps and still decent quality in the 12 kbps range. (disclaimer: I'm the Speex author)

I have my doubts about this unit. In my opinion, the days of the flash-based MP3 (ogg, etc.) players are numbered for one simple reason: they don't hold enough music. Even if it's relatively simple to sync the device with the computer, it's still a pain to have to do that every time you want to listen to new music. I own the 15GB Archos Jukebox Recorder, which I got on sale for $150 (including rebate) a couple of months ago. I was able to put all of the songs I'd downloaded from my desktop and laptop - about 10GB worth of music - on it, and a bunch of my CDs as well. Now I don't have to take a bunch of CDs around with me, as the player can hook up to my home stereo, car stereo (it's a newer stereo that has an MP3 port and I use a cable to connect the player to the port - with the Neuros you could broadcast over the stereo's FM frequency), and also at work (I hook my computer's speakers up to the player). For me, it's a much better option than the flash-based players because I can fit so much more music on it. My only complaint is that there is so much music on it that it is sometimes hard to navigate around the HD to find exactly what you're looking for, especially if you don't take the time to really organize your music by folder, track number, etc., before you upload it to your player. I have heard that the user interface for the iPod solves some of these problems, so I am hoping that Archos comes out with a software fix soon. Anyway, the bottom line is that I would go with the 20GB option here - I guess my only concern about that in this instance is that the 20GB "backpack" looks huge, and might add a lot of weight to the unit and make it bulky. The Archos I have is a little heavier than I would prefer, but really not that bad. I am still able to jog with it, which is key. I carry it in my left arm now and for the first time in years, my left arm is the same size as my right arm. Just kidding.

The 128MB Neuros player can be upgraded via a backpack to be exactly the same as the 20GB unit. Total price for the 128MB player and the 20GB backpack is only $430, just $30 more than the 20GB unit. The 20GB version is much larger and heavier, and cannot be "downgraded" to be the same as the 128MB unit. By going with the 128MB unit and a backpack, you can have a small, light, solid-state player for the gym (or whatever) and a 20GB backpack to hold all of your music, too. With the 20GB backpack on, it is *identical* to the 20GB unit. The 128MB piece is not available as a backpack, though.

If you jog with it, this is definitely the route to go. Tiny player for jogging, plug in the backpack for huge capacity.

I think you've got it backwards. In my mind, the hard drive based players' days are numbered. Flash memory capacities are raising almost as fast as the prices are dropping. It's difficult to predict the market in 3+ years, but I don't think it will be much longer than that when it will be both reasonable and affordable to fit your entire mp3 collection on flash memory. The fact that hard drives offer more storage for your money won't matter since flash will provide you with enough storage and in a much, much smaller form factor. Keep buying your hard drive players for now -- I definately agree that right now, they are a better deal (unfortunately no one offers one with enough storage for me..), so let the more casual users drive the price of flash based players down.

Check out Rockbox [rockbox.haxx.se] for an open source alternative firmware for the Archos Jukebox. One of the long-term goals of the project is the implementation of vorbis decoding (and other formats), which they claim may be possible provided they are given more information on the decoding chip.

I've been researching various portable MP3 players for some time, meanwhile budgeting some cash that I could use to buy one. I had my mind set on a iPod for a while because the design looked sleek and elegant, stored gigs of music, and reportedly got good life out of its batteries.

My alternative to an iPod would have been the player from Archos, which was AFAIK the second portable music player that stored giga-, not mega- bytes.

Since the investment in one of these players is fairly substantial (300-400 USD), and as of late I have more and more music files in.ogg format, I decided to hold off until something actually played.ogg's.

This is probably the music player that I've been waiting for. A hard drive so I can store thousands of songs (as opposed to whatever I can squeeze into 32 or 64 megs), and some 'smart' features such as recording and being able to broadcast to a radio.

I'm sure there are other people out there like me that have been waiting for this kind of player to come along, so I for one am ready to plunck down the cash and buy one, and show the industry that.ogg is a viable format. Hopefully more players will come along.

I wish Neuros the best of luck with their new product, and of course, kudos go out to the Xiph.org team for all of their hard work.

There's one benefit of Ogg that many people miss... compaines can use it in their products, whithout paying a royalty, and without worrying about the libraries changing (since they can distribute the libraries). For applications other than music players (such as games) that play sound, it's perfect. Who wants to use a system supplied mp3 library that may or may not work with your application 5 revisions down the road?

The parent wasn't talking about being able to decode files 5 or 6 revs down the road. He was talking about being able to use the libraries that implement the codec years down the line. It is easier to keep an evolving app in sync with a standard if the standard is fully documented. Also, one does not have to trust the OS vendor to keep this process easy.

Yeah, and you should ship your own STL, standard C lib, ODBC libs, GUI toolkit, print drivers, and graphics drivers with your app, too. Who knows whether the system supplied versions of the same will work with your application 5 revision down the road?

If it had usb2, firewire 800, and bluetooth support this thing would be damn near perfect. The ability to transmit music via FM radio is already hella neat. I like this thing.. although it is a wee bit expensive:(.

I e-mailed them recently asking for a time-frame. Their only comment was that they are working on it. Personally, I wouldn't hold my breath, although a CF-based, $100 Ogg player is better than the Neuros IMHO.

This is a Good Thing for sure, but keep in mind that the important thing is to help the average Joe see the benefits of Ogg. Sending your mom the CD you ripped in ogg format is way more useful than preaching benefits of ogg on slashdot.

On one of the Neuros surveys, it asked which new format you prefer they add support, and FLAC was one of them. I thought FLAC was a lossless format so one could record and edit sound files, not for listening? Do audiophiles really notice the difference between a high quality ogg/mp3 and FLAC? I don't notice any distortions with a high quality ogg vs the original. Is the FLAC file smaller? Logically and from what I've seen, the FLAC file should be bigger. It is lossless after all...

FLAC is indeed lossless, and is also indeed large. Yes, audiophiles do insist that all lossy compression is unbearable. Even if they couldn't tell the difference, they would still make the claims I'm sure. Else how could they call themselves audiophiles?

As for myself, I think Vorbis acheives the best quality to size ratio. If there are artifiacts, they aren't as irritating as mp3 artifiacts, since I notice mp3 artifacts and don't Vorbis (until you get past 128 kbps, at which point I can't tell anything about an mp3. For listening on mediocre at best headphones in public with noise around me, I would say a 64 kbps vorbis would be good enough, not so about mp3.

I have built the plugin for the Qtopia media player on the Sharp Zaurus SL5500 myself a few weeks ago. You can also find someone else's build as an IPKG on http://www.killefiz.de/.And the Zaurus could accomodate a CF harddisk (1gig)... I'm not saying that it would run off the battery for long tho.Also, I heard that the integer only decoder (Tremor) used less power than the built-in MP3 one, so battery life as affected by that is supposed to be longer (10 percent I read someplace).

Zaurus? Sharp's zaurus has supported several ogg players for ages. And it's more than just a digital music recorder/player. I've been drooling over the damn thing for months, but cannot bring myself to spend the $800CAN for one of these things yet. Perhaps next week when I go consultant full time and can write off the PDA as a business expense.

I was thinking - this is pretty cool. Then I saw it connects to your computer via usb 1.1. Who in their right mind would develop a new product with a 20GB harddrive and stick a measly USB 1.1 connection on it? There's no way that's going to work without frustrating every user

It is great that they added in an fm transmitter, but this may be the mp3 player for me for another reason. They added in mp3 recording with a line in. That means I can go, but a couple good mikes and record every show I go to. Hopefully the quality will be great.

This device looks really nice: switchable piggyback storage, FM transmittery thing, not too heavy, not too bulky, 20Gb, etc. etc. Of course ogg support is a big plus too. It could be the iPod competition we've all been waiting for! But...

USB 1.1?! What were they thinking? How could they get so close and still drop the bundle?! Transfering a CD's worth of music onto the device would take well over a minute at any decent quality. Transferring a collection onto the drive would take hours. If there were no alternatives, then sure, it's certainly not too bad. But with a disk attached to the device, there's no good reason why transfers couldn't be ten times as fast, if only they used USB2 or firewire.

As a portable harddrive, USB1.1 speeds are apalling.

Would putting firewire or USB2 on really have been so hard? As it stands, the player seems to be in the 'so close but' category.

I've got the Archos 20 GB multimedia Jukebox. Not only does it hold hundreds of CDs worth of music and allow me to record to MP3 - but it holds all of my digital photos and I can display them on the screen. Who needs to carry photos in your wallet anyway? It also plays movies. Yes you have to make sure they're a specific file type (DivX MP4), but I will admit to watching Dude, where's my Car on the train ride home;-)

The only thing I wish this thing did is have an FM Radio and (why not) support Ogg.

This Nueron thang sounds like it's got some nice features, but the lack of the video/picture functionality, plus being $100 more, I think I'm still ok for now.

Of course, something new and better will come out soon enough to make me start thinking about selling my Archos on eBay (like I did with my 10 GB model) and upgrading...

SonicBlue's Pearl [ign.com] plays Ogg. It was demoed at CES this year, so it should be on the streets by this fall. A SonicBlue employee reported [rioworld.org]
on RioWorld that it supports Ogg. It also has an ethernet base, which is unusual and forward thinking.

There's also a german firm, Pontis, coming out with an ogg capable player [pontis.de]. (Note:.ogg support is in the works)It works with CompactFlash, Secure Digital and Multimedia Card memcards (and acts also as an USB card reader/storage device). It lacks the ability to record and the radio, but I for me these are not necessary. Also, it can be used as a handheld game console, although so far it seems there are two games for it:)I have seen it for 95 Euros, so it is not that expensive. The only thing keeping me back from buyin it is its size and weight (nearly 100g - though that's half what Neuros weighs) - I want to see an.ogg firmware for the Diva MP3 player (a sexy, 36 g device:)(Yes, I love the idea of memcard based players: I have a digital camera with CF cards so I don't want to spend on built-in memory (that can not be expanded) and CDs are too big and require lots of power to operate so there will never be really small and low-powered CD-based players)

If this product comes as promised (with OGG support) it will be purchased by me. I was browsing through my Crutchfield catalog last night, picking out something, ended up throwing the catalog away in disgust because not a single player had Ogg compatibility (my entire collection is self-ripped Ogg files).

With this player and its features (especially like the MyFi radio broadcast feature) it WILL be in my possession as shortly after March 1st as humanly possible! And please, please, please let that be before mid-March and the annual road trip season.

Already got my own. Remember that Sharp Zaurus that came out a year or two ago? It makes an excellent ogg player. And it only cost me around $100 to upgrade the ram enough to store several hours of music. The advantage to using the Zaurus to these other devices is you can have your network and computers manage your music collection for you through ssh and rsync over an 802.11 net. Show me a $100 ogg player that can do it right now and you might get yourself a customer, if I didn't already have one.

The Neuros HD was reviewed [siliconvalley.com] a few days ago in the Mercury News - and the author had some less than stellar things to say about it. The software issues he mentioned will, I'm sure, be eventually worked out - but apparently the unit uses USB 1 (gack!) rather than Firewire or USB2.

Anyone care to compute out how long it would take to actually fill that 20GB hard drive that USB 1 speed?

The Palm Tungsten T [palm.com] works great as an MP3 and Ogg player with either of the shareware programs Aeroplayer [aerodromesoftware.com] or Pocket Tunes [pocket-tunes.com] installed. Aeroplayer is free for ogg use, but not free for MP3. Pocket Tunes is not free for either. In any case both are pretty cheap. The TT uses standard MMC and SD cards. Not to mention that the Tungsten T is an excellent Palm OS 5 PDA.

No, I wasn't. I was promoted to the position of Editor-in-Chief of Linux.com, then I resigned from there a few months later citing editorial differences. Then I started a web publishing project called Binary Freedom which lives on at System Toolbox [systemtoolbox.com], which I still occasionally write for.

I started a little comic/animation studio on the side, and went back to work as a UNIX Admin (which is what I was doing before I got involved in the whole web-journalism biz) at Digital Island/Exodus for about a year. I got cut in a massive acquisition layoff, chilled out for about a month and then started at Xiph [xiph.org] at the request of the team here.

Now I run Xiph full-time, and release free music [pajamacrisis.net] on the 'net in my spare time.

Wow, that was more than you really needed to know. But knowing is half the battle, etc.

Aww, c'mon. It's not even a fair comparison. There's no way that we can seriously expect to maintain a reasonable level of donations unless we've already proven ourselves completely incapable of managing money. If you really want people to 'help you out,' it seems to be a prerequisite to piss away tens of millions of dollars.

So the next time you download an Ogg formatted music file, watch out. When borrowing a mixed CD from a friend encodded in Ogg Vorbis, watch out. Because someone is surely watching you.

Yes, this is all true. We've got special plans to have Ogg Vorbis files Shock-Enabled[tm]; If you're listening to an Ogg Vorbis file and you think about copying it for a friend, a special patented algorithm will combine the electrical synapses in your brain and route the power directly to your spinal column, killing you instantly.

It's certainly a cost-savings over the all-weather troops that we've been using for the past few years.